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Jun 25, 2014
Interview: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2014)

Just before the first public performance of the musical "The Last Ship" in Chicago, the production's star composer and lyricist was hiding under a mixing console at the back of the theater. Hunkered down by the feet of the sound man, Sting kept out of sight of the ticket holders filing in. After the curtain went up and the prologue began, the singer emerged and stood in the dark aisle, quietly snapping his fingers with the music. Sitting a few feet away, a fan-club member from Italy did a double take and whispered to her friend, "Sting!" He kept his eyes on the stage...

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Jun 22, 2014
Interview: DAILY MAIL (2014)

Why my children will not be inheriting my £180million fortune: Sting wants his sons and daughters to earn their way (and says he's spending all his money anyway). As one of the world's most successful rock stars, he has risen from an impoverished childhood to amass a huge fortune. Now Sting has made it clear that his children will also have to earn their own way and should not expect to benefit from his £180 million earnings. In a frank interview in today's Mail on Sunday Event magazine, the former Police frontman said he expected his three sons and three daughters to work, and added that there would not be much left to inherit anyway...

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Jun 19, 2014
Interview: CHICAGO SUN TIMES (2014)

Sting vividly recalls walking out the door of his childhood home in Wallsend, a shipbuilding town on the northeastern coast of England, and being confronted by the massive form of one of the vessels whose construction was the lifeblood of an entire community from the 1860s until the shipyard was closed in 2007. "You'd watch this great hulking thing rise up over time, and then it would be set out to sea, and the whole process would start all over again," recalled the singer-songwriter who forged his career as a member of the new wave rock band, The Police, and then went on to work as a solo performer whose music has incorporated elements of rock, jazz, reggae, new-age, worldbeat and classical (from the English Renaissance composer John Dowland to Prokofiev and Kurt Weill). Along the way he also picked up 16 Grammy Awards and sold close to 100 million records...

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Jun 06, 2014
Interview: CHICAGO TRIBUNE (2014)

Sometime around 2004, Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, better known as Sting, a rock star with 16 Grammys and more than 100 million records sold, found himself with a severe case of writer's block. It wasn't that he stopped touring (he didn't), making money (he still made plenty) or even recording (there were albums of other people's songs and a new symphonic treatment of his past material), but he found, to his chagrin, he could not write any new songs. This went on for some eight years. He was, in the words of writer John Logan, "at an impasse." The title of Sting's intensely personal, strikingly reflective 2003 autobiography, "Broken Music," had proven prophetic...

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Jun 04, 2014
Interview: MODERN LUXURY (2014)

During a recent performance in New York, Sting told the story of how, in his shipbuilding hometown of Wallsend, northern England, when a particularly large vessel was finished, the queen would sometimes visit for the christening. On one such occasion, Sting, then a young boy, standing on the side of the road, caught her eye, and she waved to him from her royal limousine. And that, he says, was when he decided: "I didn't want to be on that street. I didn't want to end up working in that shipyard. I wanted to be in that limousine!"

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Dec 29, 2013
Interview: THE INDEPENDENT (2013)

Former Police frontman Sting is finally comfortable with the fact he is no longer able to write pop songs. He tells Julia Molony how a self-penned play helped him beat writer's block, and explains just who he sees when he looks in the mirror. Sting walks into the hotel boardroom bundled in a high-collared grey coat against the cold. His hair is tightly shorn, his clothing muted, his skin a soft beige. He only lives around the corner, he says, from the hotel in Westminster, and presumably has walked here. Except for the crop and a few more lines, he looks like he could have stepped out of the black and white video for Englishman in New York...

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Oct 13, 2013
Interview: THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH (2013)

Sting's memories of his school days aren't exactly fond. The son of a hairdresser and engineer fitter's mate, he passed his 11-plus and was promptly set on the path to great things. But first he had priests to deal with. "I got a scholarship to a grammar school," recalls the singer songwriter, actor and, now, dramatist. "So I was kind of sectioned from most of the people I was brought up with and put in this school uniform, and was sent on a train to Newcastle and taught Latin and physics and all that stuff." For a young lad from the streets of Wallsend on Tyneside, the rupture was cataclysmic. The elevation of the boy born Gordon Sumner to a better school five miles away would, ultimately, send him all around the world, with the multiple domiciles to prove it...

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Oct 09, 2013
Interview: ASSOCIATED PRESS (2013)

There's an eerie truth to a song on Sting's new album, "The Last Ship." "Dead Man's Boots" tells the story of a father passing a job to his son that the boy simply doesn't want. In a way, that story parallels the musician's life. Born in the English shipbuilding town of Wallsend, Sting clearly wanted no part of the industry, instead attending university to become a teacher. But that wasn't enough, so two years later he made an even bolder move: to pursue a career in music. "There were no clues in my environment that you leave that environment and fare well and be successful. My parents didn't really understand what my dreams were, they just thought I was crazy, because I had just given up a job with a pension and the security, in their eyes," he said...

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Oct 05, 2013
Interview: WALL STREET JOURNAL (2013)

With a run of concerts at the Public Theater, Sting is putting more pieces in place for the launch of a Broadway musical called "The Last Ship." To compose the score, the former Police frontman drew on characters and imagery from the doomed shipyard in his hometown of Wallsend, England. The musical, which Sting is developing with a squad of theater elite, starts a tryout run this summer in Chicago before opening on Broadway next fall. Sting is hoping to prime interest in the musical with his 10-concert series at the Public, which ends on Wednesday. During the intimate show, which also features vocalists such as cast member Jimmy Nail, Sting plays acoustic guitar and sings in a thick brogue, voicing various characters. He is accompanied by a small band that includes fiddle and accordion players. Between songs that blend Broadway anthems with folk sounds from the British Isles, he tells anecdotes from his childhood and the process of creating a musical...

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Sep 20, 2013
Interview: THE JOURNAL (2013)

Sting's new album and first stage musical turned his thoughts to Wallsend. David Whetstone caught up with him in New York. It seemed a long way to have come to meet a lad from Wallsend and I'm not just talking air miles. Peering down on Manhattan's road grid from a high-rise hotel room and listening to the sirens, Tyneside could have been light years away. But it is a small insight into the fabulously successful career of Sting that people can be whizzed from all corners to assist with his projects. I was here for my passing knowledge of the North East and because words like "hadaway" don't make me go "Eh?" I was here to ask questions about The Last Ship. This is Sting's current major enterprise which is due to hit the shops as a new album on Monday and Broadway next year as a musical play...

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